The present invention relates to a method of establishing a piling plan for determining information required to automatically pile the cargoes requested to be transported onto a transporting jig such as pallet, container, etc., (hereinafter referred to as a pallet), by means of a palletizing robot, that is, for determining that piling disposition which will efficiently pile the cargoes, a piling order for each cargo and an operation sequence of the robot are established. The present invention further relates to a piling system for automatically piling the cargoes on the pallet based on the established plan.
As a device for automatically piling cargoes on a pallet, there are auto-palletizers and palletizing robots (called robot palletizers). These devices are only capable of piling cargoes having the same size on one pallet. As a result, if the number of kinds of cargoes to be piled on one pallet increases due to the progress of transportation of cargoes of many kinds but small quantity, it will be impossible to pile by means of the conventional palletizing robot.
In case of piling automatically the cargoes of various different sizes on one pallet by means of automatic piling device such as a palletizing robot (hereinafter referred to simply as a robot), the following problems arise:
(1) In case of selecting a cargo piling disposition manually, due to a large increase in the number of combinations of piling dispositions, the mounting efficiency with respect to the effective mounting space on the pallet tends to be reduced. For this reason, there is a requirement for a method of establishing the piling disposition of cargoes, which method is capable of realizing high mounting efficiency even when the cargoes are of different sizes (hereinafter the established piling disposition is referred to as a piling pattern).
(2) In order to pile each cargo by means of the robot, it is necessary to teach the robot an operation for each cargo. Since the content of this operation differs for each cargo, the man-hours for the teaching increases in the conventional operation teaching method of the playback type. Therefore, there is a requirement for a method of automatically deciding, simultaneously with the establishment of the aforementioned piling pattern, an order of cargoes to be piled and a sequence of robot operations, which are used as operation teaching data for the robot.
(3) In order to supply the cargoes to the robot in the aforementioned piling order, it is necessary to search for cargoes of the designated kind among the various kinds of cargoes and to send them to the piling device. In particular, when various kinds of cargoes are to be piled on one pallet, if the search and supply of the cargoes are performed manually, the man-hours will be increased and the speed of supply will be lowered. For this reason, a marshalling method is necessary to supply the cargoes to the piling device in conformity with the above piling order.